NBC To Rebroadcast ‘The Sound of Music’ Saturday As Great Ratings Continue To Pour In

NBC announced this afternoon it will repeat its The Sound of Music Live! on Saturday, Dec. 14, 8-11 PM ET/PT. Sorry, It’s A Wonderful Life (The Jimmy Stewart movie has been bumped to Friday at 8 PM.) Craig Zadan and Neil Meron’s live staging of The Sound of Music continues to shower NBC with ratings. Immediately after Thursday’s broadcast of the musical re-staging was watched by an average of nearly 19 million viewers, NBC stations’ late-local news shot up 75% in households in the 56 metered markets (7.0 rating vs. season average 4.0 rating). That kind of payoff is sure to make local station execs happy, given that NBC reported a near-record number of promos run by both its O&O stations and NBC affiliates for a one-night event, not to mention advance coverage they’d given the live event before its broadcast on their local air and on their web sites.

After local newscasts, The Tonight Show With Jay Leno managed to match its metered-market season Thursday high – and did it with a repeat episode. (That’s excluding the previous Thursday, when Leno’s show went through the roof, owing to a Thanksgiving day football overrun.) With Sound of Music’s Live+3 viewing numbers now in, the Carrie Underwood starrer stands at 21.3 million viewers and a 5.5 rating in the demo. The only broadcast primetime entertainment series that tops SOM’s 5.5 rating in “most current” season averages is The Big Bang Theory, with a 6.9 rating. And, to the delight of NBC and advertisers who’d signed on, SOM viewers were upscale and well educated. In homes with $100K-plus incomes, The Sound of Music earned a 6.8 rating in adults 18-49, making it the highest-rated Big 4 entertainment broadcast in those homes since the Academy Awards in February. (In this, SOM is tied with ABC’s Modern Family season premiere on September 25.) In homes where the head of household has four or more years of college education, The Sound of Music scored a 7.0 rating in adults 18-49 — this season’s No. 1-ranked entertainment telecast on ABC, CBS, NBC or Fox in that category.

In other Sound of Music news, Turner Classic Movies’ planned retrospective of Eleanor Parker — the actress who played the Baroness in the Oscar-winning 1965 movie version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway musical — will not include a play of the film. Parker died Monday morning at age 91. The retrospective, set to start at 6 AM December 17, will include two of the three films for which Parker was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar — Caged and Interrupted Melody — along with The Very Thought of You, Of Human Bondage, The Woman in White, Scaramouche and Home from the Hill.